The Virginian

Sunday, July 29, 2018

I beat anorexia

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Funny

Is CNN Putin's Puppet?

If Vladimir Putin wanted to delegitimize the American election system and set American against American - and CNN didn't exit - he would have to create it.

As it is, CNN is doing Putin's work to destabilize the United States.

Here's an interesting excerpt from a Medium column written in 2017 about a Fareed Zakaria "special" tying Putin to Trump:

Major props to CNN — all of this is very clever and slickly produced, just like a propaganda film should be. It’s easy to see how the average American, watching on TV, would conclude that Russia is a sad, cold place where only power-hungry madmen like Putin can survive and prosper. CNN desperately wants you to think there’s a link between Putin and Trump, and this is their news-entertainment-scripted TV show to bring that idea into your living room (if you actually still get cable TV, that is).

Unfortunately, this approach to winning hearts and minds using TV is exactly what Peter Pomerantsev wrote about in his book about Russian propaganda television— “Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible.” Ironic, eh? CNN has taken the tactics of what Pomerantsev and the whole anti-Russia crew (Ioffe, Gessen, Remnick) call “Russian propaganda” and used it to create its own Russophobia-influenced TV special. This is what slick propaganda for the masses looks like in the digital era, and it’s all coming from the mainstream media elites in New York who are willing to say outrageous things on TV.

What made my stomach turn was how this CNN special really tried to de-legitimize the views of two people — Stephen Cohen and Henry Kissinger — who have been basically the only two high-profile people who have tried to provide an intellectual (not ideological) justification for Russia’s actions over the past three years. And former President George Bush (“43”) is basically characterized as a guileless dupe for believing he could read into Putin’s soul.

But here’s what the CNN show didn’t include:

1 — The fact that Fareed Zakaria is COMPLICIT in his own way. He’s been a host at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where Russia cozies up to the West for investment capital. And that was when Russia was under sanctions! (Just Google “Putin crushes CNN smart ass Fareed Zakaria”)

2 — The fact that Hillary Clinton was a supporter of the “reset” with Russia back in 2008. That was after eight years of Putin in power, so you can’t say that she didn’t know better. If Bush and Trump were duped, then so was Hillary.

3 — Any evidence of collusion between Putin and Trump. Not a scrap. Plenty of hearsay. Plenty of rumors. But no evidence. C’mon, CNN, at least go out and interview someone from Cozy Bear if you’re going to implicate them in a hacker attack.

4 — Any evidence that Russia is anything more than a “regional power,” as Barack Obama famously described Russia. Yes, Russia can have its way with a neighbor like Ukraine, but the U.S.? Really? At one point, Dmitry Peskov basically tells Zakaria, “Look, you’re embarrassing yourself. How could we have interfered in the election of the world’s only superpower?” ....

CNN is now in the business of being a mixed entertainment/news provider. When it comes to Russia, it’s job is to take opinions, rumors and innuendos and repackage it in a middlebrow way for the mass market. So we get these “the U.S. president is a sleeper agent of the Kremlin” stories.

The more that CNN clings to the Putin-Trump story — a story that it touts every day of the week, in both the morning and evening talks shows, the closer CNN is to becoming a true propaganda network, along the lines of Russia’s RT. That’s literally what propaganda organs do — repeat the same message over and over again, pounding it into people’s heads.

The one thing you should know about a propaganda TV network is that it looks largely like a regular TV network. You can’t really tell it’s a propaganda network until you watch enough of it. If you want to know what RT looks like, there’s an app for that — download RT to your smartphone. Or check out one of their 33,000 YouTube videos. It’s pretty slick, and the set and anchors look a lot like what you’ll find on CNN these days.

Friday, July 27, 2018

Gaslighting is a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality. Since we get so much of our information about the world from the media, their twisting of the truth is very effective.

As the media "reports" on President Trump you begin to wonder about what is real and what is fake. Especially if you don't recall past reporting. For example, the media has been reporting both that the FBI has been spying on the Trump campaign and denying that the Trump campaign has been spied on. That's gaslighting.

On Saturday night, heavily redacted copies of the FBI’s application to wiretap Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page were released. The portion of the 412-page document that was not redacted supported the claims of Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as those made by the majority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence....

President Trump tweeted triumphantly and hyperbolically about what the documents showed regarding the FBI’s behavior toward his campaign. Whatever you think about Trump’s reaction to the release of the FISA application, the media reaction to the story was disingenuous and even more hyperbolic than the president’s tweets. After a year of continuous and alarming revelations, the media are still more interested in proving the Trump campaign treasonously colluded with Russia than wrestling with the fact that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign, and used dubious partisan political research to justify their surveillance.

The media reaction to both the redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap applications and President Trump’s tweets was pure gaslighting. They claimed the FISA applications hurt the critics’ case. It wasn’t that they reported the news that critics of the FISA application felt vindicated while defenders of the wiretap applications also felt vindicated. They wrote as partisans in a war with those skeptical of FISA abuse....

This is part of a pattern for the media when they encounter facts related to the surveillance of the Trump campaign. When Department of Justice officials leaked to the media that they had run at least one informant against the Trump campaign, a breathtaking admission by any sense of news judgment, the news was buried in the middle of the story and completely downplayed.

Others joined in with the gaslighting, spending weeks arguing — and I’m not joking here — that running a secret government informant against a campaign is not spying on a campaign....

If you go back to last year, CNN’s Jake Tapper mocked and derided Republican voters who told pollsters they thought the Obama administration had spied on the Trump campaign. This mockery took place after CNN reported that … the Obama administration had spied on Page!...

You can, along with the partisan and gaslighting media, claim it’s not a big deal to run human informants or secretly gather intelligence against a presidential campaign. But you can not deny it happened.

Read the whole thing. Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist has done a remarkable job of covering this story.

I recently wrote about the FBI's betrayal of the American people. There is now ample reason to believe that the Mueller investigation is about a cover-up of crimes by the FBI and the leaders of the Obama intelligence community to shield Hillary Clinton from prosecution and to remove Donald Trump as the legally elected President. A coup that - so far -failed.

In one of the more stunning revelations contained in the report compiled by the Justice Department’s watchdog, former FBI Director James Comey claimed he doesn’t remember the moment he decided – and put down in writing -- that Hillary Clinton had committed crimes.

Under questioning, Comey admitted to the Inspector General Michael Horowitz that he authored the May 2 statement and penned every word of it himself. But then he offered the implausible claim that “he did not recall that his original draft used the term 'gross negligence,' and did not recall discussions about that issue.”

Comey’s amnesia is preposterous. He would have us believe that, as FBI director, he memorialized in print his decision that the leading candidate for president of the United States had committed crimes, yet later could not recollect anything about the most important decision of his career.

The truth is that Comey well remembers what he wrote, because he participated in subsequent discussions with top officials at the FBI about Clinton’s “gross negligence.” Several meetings were held on the subject and contemporaneous notes prove that Comey was in attendance. Those records show that although Comey was convinced that Clinton was “grossly negligent” in violation of the law, he was determined to clear her notwithstanding. To achieve this somersault and absolve the soon-to-be Democratic nominee, the legally damning terminology would have to be stricken from his statement. ...

Just as Comey, Strzok, Page and company conspired to clear Hillary Clinton, they likewise concocted their “insurance policy,” a scam investigation of then-candidate Donald Trump. The FBI had no legal basis to initiate its investigation into Trump and his campaign. Facts were invented or exaggerated. Laws were perverted or ignored. The law enforcers became the law breakers. Comey’s scheme to leak pilfered presidential memos in order to trigger the appointment of his friend, Robert Mueller, as special counsel was a devious maneuver by an unscrupulous man. Comey’s insinuation that the president obstructed justice was another canard designed to inflame the liberal media. Sure enough, they became his witting accessories.

Compare all of this – that there was never any credible evidence that Trump or his campaign collaborated with Russia to win the presidency – with the fact that there was ample evidence that Clinton had broken the law.

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Letter to FBI Director Wray

Dear Director Wray,

How do you recover the trust of someone who has been betrayed?Conservatives like me admired
the FBI.They were the good guys, the G Men, protecting the country from criminals.They
were Ephrem Zimbalist .. the good guys.They were
there to make sure that our Republic was safe, the first defense against the
enemy seeking our overthrow.

What a
shock to learn that the people who sought to overturn an election, to stage a
coup against the republic were leading members of the FBI, the CIA and the NSC.

Like the spouse who lies to you about being unfaithful when
the truth is obvious, what do you do?What
is the appropriate reaction when a creature like Strzok gaslights the American
people and says, like the cheating spouse, “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

Strzok wrote that he “loathed Congress.” But he says he didn’t mean
that. He swears he has “the utmost
respect” for Congress. Which version of Strzok is telling the truth, the private or the public FBI executive?

Strzok wrote that he and unnamed others would join to “stop”
Trump from ever getting elected. That might appear to be the definition of a
conspiracy — or collusion — by a top FBI official to interfere in an election. But
Strzok testified to Congress that he has no memory of writing those words. And,
in any event, the “we” referred to the American public —not to anybody in the
FBI.

Which version of Strzok is telling the truth, the private or the public FBI executive?

After breaking faith with the American people, it insults
our intelligence to state, as you did after the IG report: “Nothing in the
report impugns the integrity of our workforce as a whole, or the FBI as an
institution.”

According to press reports you maintain that "The FBI
that I see is tens of thousands of agents and analysts and staff working their
tails off to keep Americans safe from the next terrorist attack, gang violence,
child predators, spies from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran." I hope that’s true, but that does not address
the question of senior FBI officials discussing ways that the election of
Donald Trump can be stopped … by them, not at the ballot box but by officials of
the FBI.The worker bees may very well
be busy doing all the things that the American public expects of them.But when the top echelon of this powerful law enforcement organization interferes in an election, referring to the rank and file
is deflection.

Director Wray, you told Congress that “we don’t focus on
polls.”Public opinion should not drive criminal
investigation.However, polls are a
reflection of what people believe.If it
doesn’t concern you that a majority of the FBI’s most stalwart defenders now believe
that the FBI is trying to “frame the President” you - and we - have a serious
problem.

You should be concerned that
people have lost faith in the FBI.It’s a fact that law enforcement, to be
effective, requires people to believe that they are fair.People must believe that people with badges and guns are our friends, not
an occupying army. People must have faith that the FBI is there to protect our
institutions, not collude to overturn a
democratic election.

It is not enough to hunker down, rely on the remnant of
reputation and hope that the storm will pass. These are not normal times and extraordinary actions must be taken to restore the image of integrity on which law enforcement depends. The erosion of faith in the FBI as a politically neutral investigatory
agency has been destroyed by the investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s
emails and by the investigation of Mr. Trump. Denial and cover-up is counterproductive.People in the FBI must be held accountable for their
actions.Crimes have been committed for
which others have been sent to prison.It
is unacceptable to simply fire people for actions that have seen ordinary citizens arrested
and imprisoned.

The FBI can recover, but only if it is willing to hold
itself to standards to which it holds those outside of the agency, the “little”
people who now doubt the integrity of the FBI.If you, as the Director, are able to rise to this occasion, difficult as
it may be, you will rescue the agency.

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by chairman Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and ranking member Tom Carper (D., Del.), released a report Tuesday finding nearly every agency is failing to accurately report its spending as required by federal law.

The subcommittee reviewed over two dozen inspector general reports and determined 55 percent of the spending data submitted to USAspending.gov was inaccurate. The errors accounted for $240 billion in spending during the second quarter of 2017, according to the report.

The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014, or DATA Act, required federal spending to be easily accessible to the public through a searchable website, which became USAspending.gov. The website was revamped earlier this year, but agencies are not meeting their requirements to submit accurate, consistent, and reliable data on its spending.

The agency in charge of USAspending.gov—the Treasury Department—is among the worst culprits, as 96 percent of its own data is inaccurate.

"The most troubling aspect of the Treasury Department's difficulties in submitting accurate data to USAspending.gov is that it is the very agency that created the DATA Act standards for [the] rest of the federal government," the report said.

One hundred percent of the Defense and Energy departments' spending was either incorrectly reported or not reported at all.

The Pentagon's inspector general warned, "Policymakers may not be able to rely on the DoD's financial and award data to make decisions and effectively plan for mission critical programs and operations."

There was no honeymoon for the unlikely winner of the 2016 election. Progressives have in succession tried to sue to overturn Trump’s victory using several different approaches. First on the bogus claim of fraudulent voting machines. Then they sought to subvert the Electoral College by bullying electors into renouncing their respective states’ votes.

Massive protests and boycotts marked the inauguration. Then there were articles of impeachment introduced in the House. Some sued to remove Trump on a warped interpretation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Others brought in psychiatrists to testify that Trump was ill, disabled, or insane and should be removed in accordance with the 25th Amendment. The former FBI director, CIA director, and director of the Office of National Intelligence have variously smeared the president as a coward, a traitor, and a Russian mole.

The Mueller Investigation

We are about 430 days into Robert Mueller’s investigation; the special prosecutor whose team of lawyers and investigators has in a large part been made up either of Clinton donors, clear Clinton partisans, lawyers who have in the past represented Clinton interests or employees, or partisans already removed for expressing clear Trump hatred. The media grew ecstatic over its creation, dubbing it an “all-star” or “dream” team, as leaks assured the public that next week, next month, or “soon” there would be a sensational indictment proving that Trump colluded with the Russians to win the presidency.

...

Killing Hitler Trump

The methods of rhetorically assassinating Trump all have been tried out by progressive celebrities, politicians, and academics: decapitation, high explosives, nightly ritual stabbing, hanging, death by elevator, death by escalator, shooting, incineration, and fisticuffs. The reason that Kathy Griffin, Madonna, Robert De Niro, Kamala Harris, or Snoop Dogg have been lately quiet about killing Trump is that the various ways to do so have long ago been exhausted.

Trump as Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin is now old hat. Trump as traitor was boring long ago. What can one say after she has compared Trump’s agenda to Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, and 9/11? If the tax cuts, immigration policy, or NATO and Russian summits are equal to killing 3,000 Americans, what is left to the imagination? If talking sloppily about Putin is tantamount to the Holocaust, then what exactly was the Holocaust, a bad press conference?

...

The Roots of Trump Derangement

Is the anger, then, that we are in a depression, war, or plague?

Actually, no. The economy is growing at rates that we have not seen in over a decade. Unemployment, especially minority joblessness, is at a historic low. Even the stock market is at record highs. The United States is now the world’s largest producer of oil, natural gas, and coal. Consumer and business confidence is at a near all-time high.

...

The Left lost what it thought was a sure-thing election. There is now no assured 16-year Obama-Clinton regnum that would complete what the Obamas had called the final “fundamental transformation” of the United States. It cannot accept that it blew certain victory. A huge fundraising advantage, a toady media, massive defections of Republican establishment intellectuals and pundits, the lack of prior military or political experience of candidate Donald Trump, and a popular vote plurality all proved for naught. The unimaginable then became all too real.

...

Trump is not a George H.W. Bush or Mitt Romney. He knows no etiquette. He is no gentleman. He is a bruiser, brawler, exaggerator, and performer. What created President Trump was not just “The Apprentice” or the Manhattan real estate market (such a résumé only honed his pugilist skills).

Rather, half the country was tired of Republicans grimacing as they were portrayed as throwing grandmothers off cliffs.

...

The Left did not just lose the 2016 election, it lost the Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. And it lost them all to a rash, uncouth Queens-accented Manhattan billionaire reality TV star, who systematically planned to dismantle eight years of Obama Administration executive-orders. And unlike almost all prior politicians Trump when in office kept his promises and systematically went about to halt the supposed progressive future. Think of a liberal nightmare something akin to Sarah Palin as president in 2012.

The Obama apparat and the proverbial deep state never imagined Trump could win and thus to ensure that he would not just be defeated but humiliated, vied to use the power of government to destroy the Trump candidacy.

The National Security Council was weaponized and thus unmasked the names of surveilled Americans and leaked their names to the press to undermine the Trump campaign. The Department of Justice was weaponized to ensure Hillary Clinton was exonerated for her misdeeds concerning her email server and quid pro quo collusion with a variety of foreign and domestic influence peddlers and buyers. The FBI and CIA were weaponized to subvert the Trump campaign, by peddling an unverified smear dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton, by implanting informants into the Trump campaign, and by undermining a FISA court through dishonest presentations of evidence for warrants to spy on American citizens.

When Hillary Clinton cites the “intelligence community assessment” to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the presidential election, she’s really repeating her own lie, that her campaign created, rolled through the media and the government, which used it to spy on the Trump campaign, and then finally became an “assessment” under orders from Obama carried out by political allies like Clapper and Brennan.

The media, which once boasted of exposing Watergate, had played a key role in Obama’s Watergate.

The release of a redacted FISA warrant application exposes the fact that the spying on Carter Page, a figure associated with the Trump campaign, relied on no sources other than Democrats and media allies.

In 2016, an arm of the Clinton campaign began assembling a dossier claiming that the Trump campaign was seeking damaging information about it from the Russians. The dossier actually represented an effort by the Clinton campaign to seek damaging information from the Russians about the Trump campaign.

The man tasked with that job, a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele, then went on to accuse figures involved with the Trump campaign, of doing the very thing he had been hired to do.

One of those men was Carter Page.

The Steele dossier claimed that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was using Carter Page as an intermediary to work with the Russians against Hillary Clinton. But it was Steele who had actually been hired by the Clinton campaign to get information from the Russians to use against Donald Trump.

The FISA application to eavesdrop on Page is based on Steele’s work and the media echo chamber created around it. The intelligence assessment, which former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper admitted had been carried out under Obama’s orders, has the same tainted origins.

A Democrat smear was used by a Democrat administration to undermine a Republican’s victory.

The FISA application bets everything on Steele, while trying to hedge its bets by citing news stories, because Steele’s allegations against Page are as much of a dog’s breakfast as the rest of the dossier.

The entire excuse for spying on Carter Page and the Trump campaign were reports in the media based on a Clinton/DNC opposition research report that was never verified to this day.

The application mentions that "there has been speculation in the U.S. media that the Russian Government" was behind the DNC hack. Media allegations and speculations fill the application. First Amendment protections made the media very useful cutouts for the Clinton campaign. The unredacted FISA application was based entirely on the work of Democrats and their media allies. Fusion GPS, the organization used to hire Steele, used its contacts in the media and the government to seed the dossier. Then the dossier and the news stories based on it were used in the FISA application. Its claims about Steele’s Russian trip in 2016 are based on the unverified Steele dossier. ...
Instead of providing a second intelligence source, they offered a news story anonymously citing an intelligence source providing information to intelligence officials. But they were the intelligence officials....

The media has made Watergate into an essential part of its brand. Generations of reporters have come of age at journalism schools pretending to be Woodward and Bernstein. Not only did the media fail to expose Obama’s Watergate, but it was a key part of the infrastructure for spying on Republicans.

The FISA application reveals that domestic surveillance of Republicans would not have been possible without the media. In 2016, the media had become an official part of ‘All the President’s Men’. The reporters had become the plumbers of a political police state. Their smears were used to eavesdrop on political opponents and cast doubt on the outcome of a free and open election.

The media claims that it safeguards democracy. The FISA application shows it’s a threat to democracy.

Tuesday, July 24, 2018

This is a particularly important admission because confirmation bias would ordinarily cause him to think the opposite. It’s one of the reasons I so admire McCarthy; he can admit he’s wrong. He also isn’t usually wrong. But he has been consistently wrong in thinking that the same agencies (and even in some cases the same people) he used to know in another time and another setting (a non-Trump-Derangement setting) are being on the up-and-up and have some integrity in connection with their actions towards Trump and anything to do with Trump.

McCarthy can hardly believe the truth he’s learned; it’s so disillusioning. But he does believe it when he sees the evidence right before his eyes.

McCarthy has had a little more time now to write a column, and he further expands on some of the ideas he touched on in that interview. Please read his column in its entirety. Here’s an excerpt:

When people started theorizing that the FBI had presented the Steele dossier to the FISA court as evidence, I told them they were crazy: The FBI, which I can’t help thinking of as my FBI after 20 years of working closely with the bureau as a federal prosecutor, would never take an unverified screed and present it to a court as evidence. I explained that if the bureau believed the information in a document like the dossier, it would pick out the seven or eight most critical facts and scrub them as only the FBI can — interview the relevant witnesses, grab the documents, scrutinize the records, connect the dots. Whatever application eventually got filed in the FISA court would not even allude en passant to Christopher Steele or his dossier. The FBI would go to the FISA court only with independent evidence corroborated through standard FBI rigor.

…[and] in the unlikely event the FBI ever went off the reservation, the Justice Department would not permit the submission to the FISA court of uncorroborated allegations; and even if that fail-safe broke down, a court would not approve such a warrant.

It turns out, however, that the crazies were right and I was wrong. The FBI (and, I’m even more sad to say, my Justice Department) brought the FISA court the Steele dossier allegations, relying on Steele’s credibility without verifying his information.

I am embarrassed by this not just because I assured people it could not have happened, and not just because it is so beneath the bureau…I am embarrassed because what happened here flouts rudimentary investigative standards. Any trained FBI agent would know that even the best FBI agent in the country could not get a warrant based on his own stellar reputation…

…Much of my bewilderment, in fact, stems from the certainty that if I had been so daft as to try to get a warrant based on the good reputation of one of my FBI case agents, with no corroboration of his or her sources, just about any federal judge in the Southern District of New York would have knocked my block off — and rightly so.

That’s why I said it.

And what I have to say to Andrew McCarthy is this: it’s not your FBI or your DOJ anymore. You’ve been away for a while, and the entire ethos seems to have changed, and those changes are dangerous. The frenzy to get Trump has caused the people involved to cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil:

This is the reason that some people who broke the rules and the laws to deny Trump the Presidency that he won must go toprison.

Monday, July 23, 2018

The progressive hysteria reveals the lack of an idea. Kill, humiliate, delegitimize Trump is not a sustainable political agenda whether winning a local assembly seat or a liberal majority on the Supreme Court. But then neither are socialist ideas. If the Left was intellectually honest it would run in November on what it now professes are its new core beliefs: the abolition of ICE, the end to all deportations, open borders, expansions of affirmative action, abortion on demand, and identity politics, cancellation of student debt, universal Medicare-like coverage for Americans of all ages, massive tax hikes, more regulations, and less fossil fuel production, and an EU-like socialist-democratic foreign policy.

The problem is that the above is probably not a 51 percent winnable program. And progressives fear that their base will not allow them to move to the center to capture the old blue-collar white working class, or the Perot, Tea-Party and Blue Dog voter. Nor can they afford to move much further leftward, given they are increasingly dependent on Obama-like identity politics candidates without an Obama-like charismatic candidate.

Democrats privately acknowledge that Obama wrecked the Democratic Party—losing Congress, the presidency, state and local offices, and now the Supreme Court. But they must praise the forces of that wreckage and seek to trump them by becoming the party of hyper-identity politics. In other words, the Democrats know what sort of agenda might bring them back into power as it did in 1992. But they feel that Clintonesque cure is worse than the disease of being in the purer political wilderness without power.

So, for now, they rant, they rave, and they stew, accepting that they cannot do what might save them and therefore they only do more of what is destroying them. Out of that lose-lose dilemma was birthed Trump hatred. Without a persuasive argument, progressives came up with the mantra that Trump is a traitor, and that all they needed to do was to explain to supposedly dense voters that their current economic renaissance was actually jackbooted National Socialism.

How far will the Left go? I fear that we have seen nothing yet.

At this point, Leftists are driving the middle to Trump as the only safe choice, which is amazing if you think about it.

The FISA application shows that the Obama administration didn’t just deploy its media echo chamber to manipulate public opinion, but also used it to justify its abuse of domestic surveillance against its political opponents.

The media has made Watergate into an essential part of its brand. Generations of reporters have come of age at journalism schools pretending to be Woodward and Bernstein. Not only did the media fail to expose Obama’s Watergate, but it was a key part of the infrastructure for spying on Republicans.

The FISA application reveals that domestic surveillance of Republicans would not have been possible without the media. In 2016, the media had become an official part of ‘All the President’s Men’. The reporters had become the plumbers of a political police state. Their smears were used to eavesdrop on political opponents and cast doubt on the outcome of a free and open election.

The media claims that it safeguards democracy. The FISA application shows it’s a threat to democracy.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party, increasingly his subsidiary, should be headed to a reckoning of historic proportions. But, despite his own often unforced errors, Trump may have found an unwitting ally far more impactful than Vladimir Putin: the Democratic Party.

In their anti-Trump fervor, the Democrats have embraced leftist positions that weaken their prospects in 2018 and, perhaps even more so, beyond. This leftward shift was evident in scores of elections around the country as well as here in California where the party endorsed climate activist and open-borders advocate Kevin De Leon over longtime centrist, and still heavily favored, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The lurch to the left could become particularly problematic if the economy, always a big if, holds up. Right now almost two-thirds of voters think the economy is in good shape, according to a recent YouGov poll. To be sure, Trump’s approval ratings are not great, but not much worse than those at the same stage of their presidencies as Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all but one of which was re-elected to second term.

The Russians did the bad things during the Obama era. Obama KNEW they were doing the bad stuff, and yet did nothing about it. Obama argued that we should put the past behind us and try to cooperate in the future…

The Democrats felt sorry for Bob Mueller so they found a job for him that he could really enjoy.

In fact, Trump’s response to Lemire, and his overall conduct at the press conference, did not convey weakness at all. Certainly he was far more assertive of US interests than Obama was in his dealings with Russia.

In Obama’s first summit with Putin in July 2009, Obama sat meekly as Putin delivered an hour-long lecture about how US-Russian relations had gone down the drain.

As Daniel Greenfield noted at Frontpage magazine Tuesday, in succeeding years, Obama capitulated to Putin on anti-missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, on Ukraine, Georgia and Crimea. Obama gave Putin free rein in Syria and supported Russia’s alliance with Iran on its nuclear program and its efforts to save the Assad regime. He permitted Russian entities linked to the Kremlin to purchase a quarter of American uranium. And of course, Obama made no effort to end Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

TRUMP IN contrast has stiffened US sanctions against Russian entities. He has withdrawn from Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. He has agreed to sell Patriot missiles to Poland. And he has placed tariffs on Russian exports to the US.

So if Trump is Putin’s agent, what was Obama?

Never forget:

Barack Obama to
Medvedev: "On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this,
this can be solved but it's important for him [Putin] to give me space."

Medvedev: "Yeah,
I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you …"

Barack Obama:
"This is my last election. After my election I have more
flexibility."

Medvedev: “I will
transmit this information to Vladimir.”

And that’s how Barack
Hussein Obama sold out his country to win an election.

But the strain has been terrific, and there is no doubt that the man [Brenan] is barking. So he deserves our compassion. He also deserves our vigilance. Give him a sweet and wipe his brow as you walk by, but make sure that the straps on the straight jacket are secure.

It was President Trump’s summit meeting and subsequent press conference with President Putin in Helsinki that sent poor John Brennan and his faithful anti-Trump cultists into orbit. I don’t think we’ve seen anything quite like it since the melee at Charlottesville, when Trump had the temerity to suggest that there was plenty of blame on both sides of the protest.

That was supposed to be a “moral disgrace” just as his efforts to patch things up with Russia was supposed to be “treasonous.”

You may think, as I do, that Trump is doing the right thing by reaching out a hand to Vladimir Putin, odious though he is. Or you might believe, as many thoughtful people do, that Putin is just too odious to do business with. People can disagree about that, though I would note that I cannot see that Putin is any more odious than Joseph Stalin, with whom FDR consorted, or his successors, which every US President since have had to deal with. Mao Tse-Tung was one of the greatest monsters in history. That didn’t stop Richard Nixon from making overtures to him. Was that “treasonous”?

And ...

Yep, the party that has spent a decade and more coddling Washington elites and ignoring the heartland as a bastion of “irredeemable deplorables,” the party that has destroyed black inner cities across the country by a making their inhabitants wards of the state: here they are with “for the people.” “House Democrats,” Politico says, “plan to begin working ‘For the People’ into their statements and press conferences.”

Saturday, July 21, 2018

Was Mueller given authority to investigate a specific defined matter, or has he illegally been granted authority to investigate the Deep State's enemies for any possible crime until it finds one?Seems like the latter.

Brennan — it is well known and he admits it — voted for Communist Party USA chief Gus Hall in the 1976 presidential election. Talk about sex change operations. He excuses that as kind of youthful indiscretion — he was in his early twenties — and evidently many (including Obama, who gave him his job) believed him or said they did.

But I was only a few years older than Brennan then and remember those days well, since I too was on the left. I was even an acquaintance of such notorious characters as Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden and knew dozens of people who, to one degree or another, sympathized with them. Yet not a single person I can recall voted for Gus Hall or even remotely considered it. Hall was a Stalinist, for crissakes! He was anathema, everything the young people of the so-called New Left were rebelling against then — and, in this one case at least, justifiably so. The mass-murdering crimes of Stalin were already common knowledge.

Years later, when I read Brennan was among the minuscule .07 percent who actually voted for Hall, I was astonished. How could such a person end up director of the CIA? I mean, I'm all for redemption and everything, but there are limits. Voting for a Stalinist candidate as late as 1976 would be akin to a personality disorder, almost like voting for Satan. It's one thing to forgive Brennan for this, hard as that may be, but there is something seriously unsettling about putting him at the helm of our most famous intelligence agency. (Other questions have arisen about Brennan's Middle East connections.)

But now we have him leading the charge against Trump, accusing the president of actual treason in his dealings with Putin, the very thing Brennan's former hero Hall directly advocated. It's enough to make a sane man paranoid.

The response to the Helsinki meeting has been so extreme on all sides that questions about the maturity, stability, and intelligence of the entire American political community are incited and require some act of faith to deal with positively. Earlier U.S. presidents created shock waves as great as these but managed them better.

The Trump phenomenon and his assault on the political establishment were bound to cause immense convulsions....

There will long be debate about which side, Trump or his enemies, is chiefly responsible for this worrisome and unseemly escalation where his enemies want to remove him from office for undiscovered crimes before he is able to have them prosecuted and imprisoned for crimes of which there is, unfortunately, a good deal of indisputable evidence. Trump’s enemies could not resist the temptation to try to undo the election; he would have let bygones be bygones, but he is not one to turn the other cheek when attacked.

Mark Steyn receives George Jonas Freedom Award

Fox News' Tucker Carlson announced on his show Thursday evening that two separate sources confirmed the offer.

"In other words, for a near identical crime, Bill and Hillary's friend could escape and emerge completely unscathed while Paul Manafort may rot in jail. Only one of them made the mistake of chairing Donald Trump's presidential campaign," Carlson said.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

It's not moral or ethical to encourage people to go to war, that you have their back, and then sit by while they get killed. Long, but worth reading the whole thing.

America has a limited appetite for war. Americans will go to war, but they do reach a point of exhaustion with war after some number of years.

It is silly to pretend this fact away in order to count oneself as "idealistic." People who ignore reality are not "idealistic;" they're just cowards afraid to face reality.

The fact is that Americans are tired of war and it is dangerous to write checks on America's war-fighting account that it might not be willing to cover.

The fact is that one of America's two main political parties is always willing to be part of a war at the Fun Part of the war -- the declaration of war part, the first-easy-victories part -- but which abandons every war it votes for when it sees any small political advantage in doing so.

Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and many other Democrat Senators voted for the War in Iraq. Within three years, they were screaming that Bush "lied us into war" and that we must withdraw immediately.

It is insane to pretend this away. If you know Democrats will give you initial support for a war they'll happily vote you into, when doing so grants them political advantage, and then savagely turn on that war the moment they get political advantage from that, it is lunacy to even count them as allies in war.

By the way: The NeverTrumpers who sometimes claim "At least Hillary Clinton would have been better on foreign policy?" Yes, of course. The same Hillary Clinton who voted for the War in Iraq to show how tough she would be as a president, and then agitated to abandon troops in the field when she realized that opposing the war would boost her chances of becoming president.

Yeah, we need that kind of patriot as President, rather than the unamerican, immoral Trump.

And this ...

In 2008, Obama campaigned on the idea that he would somehow both withdraw from Iraq and yet also "win" Iraq by withdrawing.

I was incensed by this; it was so obviously, transparently a lie and a dodge. He wasn't planning to "win" anything; he just wanted to bug out. I was angry at the media for never challenging his "Win by Withdrawing" claims and pissed off at Americans for believing this bullshit.

But they voted him into office anyway, and by decent margins. I realized that Americans weren't really tricked by Obama; rather, Obama told them a lie that they knew was a lie but they wanted some "out" to pretend they were honoring the sacrifice of the already-dead while also bugging out of Iraq.

So Obama pretended he would "win" the war in Iraq, and the American public pretended to believe him.

Here's the money quote from this guy, its is an excellent observation:

Social justice is a surveillance culture, a snitch culture. The constant vigilance on the part of my colleagues and friends did me in. That's why I'm delivering sushi and pizza.

He means its the Stazi. And it totally is. Ask yourself, when the Stazi came knocking, would a grovelling apology have saved the one they came for? Nope. By then its too late.

When the Stazi comes, all there is left to choose is the manner of your death. You can die well, on your feet like a Man, or like a dog in a ditch. Metaphorically speaking of course. They can't -really- come for you.

Airbrushing history is what Communists do. One day you're in Stalin's inner circle, the next you're and enemy of the people, you're dead and your image disappears from official photographs.

When the American Library Association renamed an award formerly bearing Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name, calling her works “dated” and racially offensive, the reaction was swift and passionate. Wilder is more than just another author for many people. She’s been a long-standing, much beloved American icon for generations of children.

Those librarians may have underestimated how large and deep the outcry would be, but stripping Wilder’s name and legacy seems to be a rallying point for many people right now. It’s more than just an award being renamed, this is a symbol of the rewriting of American history into a cleaner, more palatable and PC version....

I am sad to see them politicizing Laura’s words. She was an inspiration for us and was a kind, caring person. You could see it in her eyes. Since I was only six years old when she passed, I do not remember much other than the kindness in her eyes and her smile. A Native American elder who helped me through the loss of my children once told me, “Some of the Creator’s best people come from the hardest tempering.”

Truer words could not be spoken of Laura. Her life was hard, and she expressed herself the best way that she could based on the time period. Why people have to change her words to suit modern times is beyond me. History and life does not work that way. Those who have the ability to see the soul that resides within Laura’s eyes will understand. The rest belongs to history.

Brennan the Communist gets paid by CNN

"John Brennan started out his adulthood by voting for the communist party presidential candidate. He is now ending his career by showing himself to be the most biased, bigoted, over the top, hyperbolic, and unhinged Director of the CIA we have ever had." -@RandPaul.

"John Brennan started out his adulthood by voting for the communist party presidential candidate. He is now ending his career by showing himself to be the most biased, bigoted, over the top, hyperbolic, and unhinged Director of the CIA we have ever had." -@RandPaul. pic.twitter.com/OUt6xn2uOj

Abandoning every position they've ever held to attack Trump is standard operating procedure these days.

In addition to Trump's not challenging Putin to a fistfight in Helsinki, the media have gone bananas over the fact that he cited the findings of our intelligence agencies -- but then added that Putin denied the charges.

HE'S BELIEVING PUTIN OVER OUR OWN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES? Moral equivalence! Treason! High crimes and misdemeanors! Kristallnacht! Trump might as well have trampled on a portrait of George Washington. (Or, since we're talking about liberals, Stalin.)

But the way I remember it, elected Democrats -- even Democratic candidates for president -- have criticized our intelligence agencies pretty ferociously, particularly regarding the Iraq War.

The media turned that clown Joe Wilson into a national hero for ridiculing the findings of our intelligence agencies.

At the inception of the war, U.S. intelligence, British intelligence and the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Saddam Hussein had been seeking massive quantities of uranium from Niger.

But Joe Wilson was sent by his wife, a non-covert, paper-pushing CIA agent, on a trip to Niger, where he looked government officials directly in the eye and asked them: Did Saddam send envoys to this godforsaken country that has nothing to sell but uranium in order to buy uranium? Be honest! I have absolutely no way of knowing if you are lying, and powerful, nuclear-armed nations will be really mad at you if you say "yes."

It was on the basis of this conversation that Wilson concluded, as he wrote in The New York Times: "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Far from condemning this unpatriotic lout for crapping on our intelligence agencies, the media made him a star! Only a fool like George W. Bush would believe our inept intelligence agencies over the word of a government official from Niger.

So doing an about-face on a previous, long-held position is no problem for liberals, provided it serves the larger purpose of getting Trump.

This kind of blatant double-standard on the part of the left is a feature, I think, not a bug.

The inconsistency may reveal that the left inflicts "rules" on its enemies that it feels free to ignore itself. But that itself is a demonstration of the left's power-- I think they get off on openly announcing that they are free to make up rules to impose on others and completely violate those same rules with impunity.

It's a demonstration of how much power they have, and maybe more importantly, how much power you don't have.

They want you to know who's in charge, and who you must bow to, and this sort of blatant, not-even-hiding-it demonstration of their power to unilaterally print up entire tomes of new rules and also unilaterally suspend operation of those rules when they choose is nothing if not a reminder of who is the ruler, and who is the ruled.

With Russia, liberals get an extra bonus of bludgeoning Trump over his nonexistent collusion with Russia -- our greatest enemy since very, very recently.

At least no Democratic president ever publicly embraced a Russian dictator, while handing him all of Eastern Europe at Yalta, so the left's conscience is clear!

Actually, no. Until all the Roosevelt statues come down, liberals need to settle down about Russia. At least Trump isn't calling Putin "Uncle Vlad" and giving him one-third of Europe, as he is being advised by two Russian spies.

Ace as talking about this kind of gay-baiting. Gay jokes were officially made a Crime Against the State sometime around 2009. But not if you're part of theState Media.

This kind of blatant double-standard on the part of the left is a feature, I think, not a bug.

The inconsistency may reveal that the left inflicts "rules" on its enemies that it feels free to ignore itself. But that itself is a demonstration of the left's power-- I think they get off on openly announcing that they are free to make up rules to impose on others and completely violate those same rules with impunity.

It's a demonstration of how much power they have, and maybe more importantly, how much power you don't have.

They want you to know who's in charge, and who you must bow to, and this sort of blatant, not-even-hiding-it demonstration of their power to unilaterally print up entire tomes of new rules and also unilaterally suspend operation of those rules when they choose is nothing if not a reminder of who is the ruler, and who is the ruled.

It's a feature designed to demonstrate the power of the Ruling Class.

It's one of the main reasons they hate Trump: he's not afraid to push back ... twice as hard. They're not used to that and they hate it.

The amusing thing is that the dim bulbs that run the Virginian Pilot lost the plot a long time ago.

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

He is a tough and smart negotiator. He sizes up his opponent, and he knows that the approach that works best for one is not the same as for another. It does not matter what he says publicly about his negotiating opponent. What matters is what results months later. In his first eighteen months in Washington, this man has turned around the American economy, brought us near full employment, reduced the welfare and food stamp lines, wiped out ISIS in Raqqa, moved America’s Israel embassy to Jerusalem, successfully has launched massive deregulation of the economy, has opened oil exploration in ANWR, is rebuilding the military massively, has walked out of the useless Paris Climate Accords that were negotiated by America’s amateurs who always get snookered, canned the disastrous Iran Deal, exited the bogus United Nations Human Rights Council. He has Canada and Mexico convinced he will walk out of NAFTA if they do not pony up, and he has the Europeans convinced he will walk out of NATO if they don’t stop being the cheap and lazy parasitic penny-pinchers they are. He has slashed income taxes, expanded legal protections for college students falsely accused of crimes, has taken real steps to protect religious freedoms and liberties promised in the First Amendment, boldly has taken on the lyme-disease-quality of a legislative mess that he inherited from Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama on immigration, and has appointed a steady line of remarkably brilliant conservative federal judges to sit on the district courts, the circuit appellate courts, and the Supreme Court.

What has Anderson Cooper achieved during that period? Jim Acosta or the editorial staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post? They have not even found the courage and strength to stand up to the coworkers and celebrities within their orbits who abuse sexually or psychologically or emotionally. They have no accomplishments to compare to his. Just their effete opinions, all echoing each other, all echoing, echoing, echoing. They gave us eight years of Nobel Peace Laureate Obama negotiating with the ISIS JV team, calming the rise of the oceans, and healing the planet.

The Bushes got us into all kinds of messes. The first one killed the economic miracle that Reagan had fashioned. The second one screwed up the Middle East, where Iraq and Iran beautifully were engaged in killing each other for years, and he got us mired into the middle of the muddle. Clinton was too busy with Monica Lewinsky to protect us from Osama bin Laden when we had him in our sights. Hillary gave us Benghazi and more. And Obama and Kerry gave us the Iran Deal, ISIS run amok, America in retreat. All to the daily praise of a media who now attack Trump every minute of every day.

It really is quite simple. Everyone is smart except Donald J. Trump. That’s why they all are billionaires and all got elected President. Only Trump does not know what he is doing. Only Trump does not know how to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. Anderson Cooper knows how to stand up to Putin. The whole crowd at MSNBC does. All the journalists do.

They could not stand up to Matt Lauer at NBC. They could not stand up to Charlie Rose at CBS. They could not stand up to Mark Halperin at NBC. Nor up to Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic, nor Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, nor Michael Oreskes at NPR, at the New York Times, or at the Associated Press. But — oh, wow! — can they ever stand up to Putin! Only Trump is incapable of negotiating with the Russian tyrant.

Remember the four years when Anderson Cooper was President of the United States? And before that — when the entire Washington Post editorial staff jointly were elected to be President? Remember? Neither do I.

The Seedier Media never have negotiated life and death, not corporate life and death, and not human life and death. They think they know how to negotiate, but they do not know how. They go to a college, are told by peers that they are smart, get some good grades, proceed to a graduate degree in journalism, and get hired as analysts. Now they are experts, ready to take on Putin and the Iranian Ayatollahs at age 30.

Yet it's Donald J. Trump who's President, has a beautiful model as his wife, and is a billioniare. Go figure.

A former co-worker of Peter Strzok tells Big League Politics about Strzok’s extensive background in the intelligence community, including the fact that he grew up in Iran. Many intelligence officers like Strzok are complete ghosts with questionable history and gaps in their life story. But now we have some insight. (RELATED: Strzok Worked For CIA And FBI At Same Time, According To Document).

Peter Strzok was born in the late 1960’s – he attended the American School in Iran up until 1978 when it closed down and then he attended the American School in Saudi Arabia. He supposedly attended a Catholic School, St. John’s Prep in Minneapolis (the school refused to confirm or deny attendance) and then completed a Bachelors at Georgetown and some form of graduate degree after that.

The truth is that after Peter Strzok III turned 18 his life is arcane, which is the usual story of many like him. Did you know that Peter Strzok II (Strzok’s father) and Hillary Clinton have a lot in common? It turns out after advocating for Khomeni in Iran and then working in Saudi Arabia to calm the waters of an Iranian government (appeasing them with anti-Semitic rhetoric), Strzok’s father Strzok II also dabbled in “charity work.” Strzok’s father was involved in so-called charity work in Haiti but also helped dismantle and reassemble Upper Volta..now known as Burkina Faso.

A lot of it's conjecture, but the image of Peter Strzok, simple FBI agent who hated Trump, may be a distration from the truth. Like the quesions about the DNC server we should ask: who and what is Peter Strzok.

Strzok was the main operative in “Operation Crossfire Hurricane,” a Deep State plot to run legal attacks on President Trump’s team.

Now we know that Strzok was really a CIA agent. He only held a ceremonial title in the Bureau, but was really operating under the leadership of the CIA, including Obama’s vindictive CIA director John Brennan.

intellihub reports: “A sheep-dipped Peter Strzok has been covertly operating as the Section Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterespionage Group during his secret 24 year tenure with the agency while masquerading as Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counterintelligence Division where he was in charge of investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server along with the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.

Both John Brennan and James Comey used Peter Strzok to damage President Donald Trump. Strzok is the disgraced FBI agent and fired Robert Mueller team member whose text messages with mistress Lisa Page form the biggest scandal in FBI history. The lovers conspired to illegally bring down Trump, all while the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign....

When it was time for the conspirators to focus on Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, Strzok was there to run information about the adviser to the Australians. When it was time to take out Trump’s national security adviser General Michael Flynn, Strzok was there to stage an “ambush” interrogation of Flynn without Flynn’s lawyer present.

The most obvious motivation was Trump’s standard business modus operandi of taking the psychological high ground by complimenting the man on the other side of the table. Through praise and pacification, Trump hopes his adversary will let down his guard to allow for more communication and negotiation, or hopes he will be distracted while Trump plans harsher methods in the future.

This isn’t 3-D chess. It’s a simple tactic....

Second, context matters. Trump didn’t just plop down in Helsinki and criticize America’s intelligence community and give Putin leeway when it comes to the Russian government meddling in the U.S. election on a whim. This meeting came after two years of unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate and a president who has been accused of colluding with a foreign government based only on opposition research by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign.

The media leaks, counterintelligence investigation, improper FISA warrants, use of spies before a full investigation has even begun, a special counsel probe into collusion without evidence of a crime, biased investigators, more media leaks, and hounding of the president at every step by the intelligence community have disrupted our political system far more than any Russian meddling could -- meddling that wasn’t new to 2016, by the way.

The fact is, despite the many indictments in the investigation, there have been no charges of collusion and no evidence of collusion, but the narrative of collusion continues. Trump’s election by the American people has been repeatedly questioned and his presidency targeted for delegitimization by individuals wielding a great deal of power in secret. Even now, calls for impeachment based on thin air are ringing across the media and in the halls of government.

This false narrative has been driven by members of the FBI and the intel community who had a hand in propping up false evidence in an investigation, and who worked with foreign governments to gather information in a case against Trump with no basis in fact. In the words of FBI special agent Peter Strzok: “We will stop him!”

This effort to malign, sabotage, and then seek to remove a duly elected president based on no evidence of collusion or wrongdoing is an attack on the American voter. It’s not about Trump, it’s about them, because they put him there.

This is an excellent point. It's fundamentally an attack on the American people who voted for Trump and an attack on the American election system. The truth is that the Russians and other foreign powers who have been trying to influence our elections have been minor league compared to the Democrat/Leftists/Media attacks on our elections. It's not an exaggeration to say that at this point, CNN, MSNBC, the NY Times and the Washington Post are bigger threats to democracy than Putin. Deposing a sitting president who is innocent of a crime on trumped up charges threatens the future of this country as a representaive Republic. This is what treason looks like.